Starbuck's Reconsiders The Details

In yet another chapter in Starbuck's continuing struggles to recapture its former luster, the chain is now planning a significant change in what would seem to be a trivial activity. After what has apparently been intensive study of how and when coffees are brewed in the roaster's many stores, management has decided to focus on having fresher pots of coffee always available.


The Wall Street Journal reported, in a recent article,


"Instead of grinding coffee only in the morning, baristas will grind beans each time a new pot is brewed. Timers will buzz to signal when it's time to make a new batch, according to internal Starbucks documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The changes are part of the Seattle-based company's effort to reinvigorate the "Starbucks experience" in the face of competition from less-expensive rivals such as McDonald's Corp. and 7-Eleven Inc. With Starbucks' changes, customers will be able to hear the whir of grinders and smell the aroma of fresh coffee all day.


Two years ago, Howard Schultz, then chairman of the company, wrote a memo to executives blaming the chain's excessive focus on growth and efficiency for cheapening the coffee-shop experience he long had championed. Mr. Schultz wrote that an earlier switch to preground coffee had taken the "romance and theatre" out of a trip to Starbucks.

"We achieved fresh-roasted bagged coffee, but at what cost? The loss of aroma -- perhaps the most powerful nonverbal signal we had in our stores," he wrote.


Currently, baristas decide when to brew fresh batches "based on multiple signals ranging from demand (quantity), to expiration and timing," the new documents say, explaining that the revamped process "reduces this complexity by eliminating many of these signals."


The documents say that currently, "by using dedicated [containers] to brew coffee, our customers may experience a coffee outage 14 minutes out of every hour, or 23% of the time! This coffee outage occurs for seven minutes during every batch, making brewed coffee unavailable to our customers." As a result, customers can be forced to wait, choose another type of coffee or leave the store empty handed. "To solve the brewed-coffee outage problem, we must change the way we brew coffee," the documents say.


Some baristas said the extra grinding and brewing might slow service and turn off customers with added noise.

But demonstrating to customers that coffee is ground and brewed on the spot could help Starbucks maintain its premium position, especially as rivals tout less-expensive alternatives."


What struck me about Schultz' approach and concerns is that it probably won't attract coffee drinkers the chain hasn't already won over long ago. I'm not a big Starbuck's fan, personally, but I visit their stores with/for my daughters on occasion. The same people are generally in the one we most often frequent.

I honestly don't think more freshly-ground or -brewed coffee aroma will bring (back) Dunkin' Donuts' and McDonalds' coffee drinkers. It's a segmentation issue, and Starbucks long ago sewed up the segment that celebrates expensive coffee and the coffee houses in which one may linger to drink it.

Finally, in these times of government intervention into financial services, auto production and healthcare, I find it instructive how detailed and minute are Schultz' and Starbucks' managers' focus on their business.

Look again at how deeply and precisely the firm's management had studied a specific part of their operation with an eye to customer motivations and need satisfactions.

No governmental civil servant is going to do that. Yet, that's what it takes to succeed in business. Focus on customer wants and needs. Diligent, constant, detailed review of your own business' offerings, strategies, and operations.

Is Schultz right in changing the Starbucks' stores' coffee brewing? I don't know, but I doubt it. Still, he and his managers feel it's an important change to make in order to revive growth, profitability and equity value for the firm.

I just don't see that sort of combination of analytical rigor and imagination from any government hacks trying to oversee, restructure or operate significant portions of the US economy.